10,000 Uncounted Ballots Found in Texas County: Officials

A voting center worker handles mail-in ballots in a file photo. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Officials in Texas said they discovered about 10,000 uncounted ballots in last week’s primary election, which led to a delay in the results.

The Harris County Elections Office said that some 6,000 Democratic votes and 4,000 Republican votes weren’t counted and will be added to final tallies.

“While the votes were scanned into our tabulation computer, they were not transferred and counted as a part of the unofficial final results as they should have been,” the Harris County Elections Office stated over the past weekend. They blamed an “oversight” for why the votes weren’t counted in the county, which is home to Houston.

The office also told local news outlet KHOU-TV that officials “are focused on ensuring that every ballot cast is accounted for through this canvassing process,” and they “will continue to be transparent in that process through our updates but as you can imagine it is most critical that everyone on our team stay focused and commit all of their time to the task at hand.”

“We will be discussing at commissioners court and that will be an opportunity for broadcast to hear from our office,” the Harris County Elections Office continued.

The March 1 primary was the first Texas election that took place in the state under tighter voting laws that were passed last year. Thousands of mail-in ballots were rejected across the state for not having new information.

Following the discovery of the uncounted ballots, the Harris County Republican and Democratic party chairs told KHOU that they believe the issue will be fixed soon.

“Every voter regardless of party should be able to have confidence that their vote has been properly counted. Unfortunately, this is another example of the serious mismanagement of [Harris County Judge] Lina Hidalgo’s unqualified Elections Administrator. Isabel Longoria owes all Harris County voters an explanation,” Harris County GOP Chair Cindy Siegel said, according to the news outlet.

On Monday, the Harris County GOP filed a lawsuit against Longoria and her office for committing the “worst elections fiasco in Texas history” by not counting the ballots.

Meanwhile, Harris County Democratic Party Chair Odus Evbagharu released a statement saying his party is also concerned with the balloting problem.

“We called for a post-election review of all processes—there has not been any skirting of party responsibility, and we have been completely transparent in our desire to dig into the details of what went wrong and identify how to make corrections moving forward,” Evbagharu remarked.

The Harris County Elections Office hasn’t immediately responded to a request for comment.